Space, Knowledge, and Power

This forum examines the spatial dimensions of human experience, how spatial knowledge is produced, and the ways in which people and institutions represent space to realize visions of order. How do people interact with the spaces around them? How do they reach out to the wider world to shape it? How do their understandings of these spaces, in turn, shape them as individuals and as members of cultures and societies?

Here are just some of the ways we will explore how space shapes the production of knowledge and understandings of the world:

Throughout human history, states have claimed spaces, asserting sovereignty, taking possession of territory, and regulating land and water to proclaim and expand their power.

Race, class, gender, and sexuality are social categories that determine rules for mobility in and across spaces that range from the intimate and domestic to the regional and global.

The study of warfare, law and justice, political action, and social conflict is inherently spatial.

The map is a vital object through which we gain access to this process of conceptualizing, representing, and disseminating ideas about space.

Mathematics emerged as a method of enquiry to make it possible to perceive terrestrial space at scales beyond human sensory.

Every human culture explains its place in the universe through cosmology, and “space is our word for the vast dimensions of the universe beyond earth’s atmosphere.

To study the human territoriality describes the conscious as well as the subconscious ways in which people understand their relationships to the world around them.

The rise of instantaneous, low-cost interactions across “cyberspace” seem to challenge the distances that physical spaces once imposed and break down the hierarchies that once generated knowledge about places we could not easily see and experience for ourselves

The ramifications of space runs through the breadth of the Liberal Arts & Sciences. Energized by new computing tools for visualizing geospatial data, historians, anthropologists, psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, religious studies scholars, literary scholars, and historians of art, architecture, and landscape are undertaking pioneering new work. Astronomers, physicists, environmental scientists, geographers, and geologists have always conducted their research and expressed their findings in spatial terms. Whether examined through their material, ecological, political, or cultural aspects, the relationship between nature and society is fundamentally a spatial problem. The experience of travel, in all of its wonder and danger, is a bright thread that runs through literature, the visual arts, and music.

Instructors

Max Edelson, Associate Professor of History

My research focuses on the history of empire and mapping in the North America, the Caribbean, and beyond. My first book focused on the rise of plantation societies in colonial America. To understand the spread of plantation slavery in early South Carolina and Georgia, I studied agriculture, environment, and economy across the landscapes of the Lowcountry region. My new research explores how Great Britain mapped America in the generation before the American Revolution. To visualize hundreds of maps of North America and the Caribbean, I helped design and develop MapScholar, an online platform for geospatial history. I teach classes on early American history, digital humanities, and the history of maps and mapping, and I am developing a new courses on indigenous cartographies around the world.

Our Forum will be a place in which to think deeply about how space structures culture, society, and everyday life. We will explore how the mind grapples with navigation; how maps of all kinds connect individuals to households, communities, and nations; and, by doing so, hone a perspective on learning that begins from the idea of every individual is immersed in wider spaces that give life meaning.

Ricardo Padrón, Associate Professor of Spanish

As the child of an immigrant family (My mom, brother, and I are from Ecuador, and my dad was from Cuba), I grew up hearing stories about distant places and people, and learning to love them from afar. So as I got older, I developed a fascination with books (mostly fantasy and science fiction) that were good at creating convincing, immersive, alternative worlds. I became fascinated with the maps that often came with those books, and discovered that I could make my own stories by tracing their outlines and exploring the parts that did not figure much in the stories. It never occurred to me that maps could be something one could study seriously, but years later, I found myself in the library at Harvard University trying to figure out how to do just that. I had enrolled in the doctoral program in Romance Languages and Literatures determined to settle in to a particular intellectual discipline, something I had never been good at doing. Both of the degrees I had already earned, a BA in Political and Social Thought from U.Va. and an MA in Religious Studies from Chicago, were interdisciplinary in nature, and most people were telling me I would never get job as a professor if I continued to do interdisciplinary work. Yet that was the way my mind worked, so I dove into the emerging field of cartography and literature, exploring the ways that storytelling helps make sense out of space, and the way mapping tells stories.

Since then, most of my academic work has involved figuring out how speakers of Spanish conceptualized the world during what we used to call the Age of Exploration, the period of aggressive European expansion into the non-European world that spanned the years 1450 through 1650, more or less. My research has taken me to archives on three continents, where I have had the privilege of studying rare and beautiful maps, as well as the books and manuscripts that went with them. Most recently, I’ve gotten interested in the ways that Spaniards mapped the Pacific Ocean as a small, navigable basin that served to integrate America with Asia, rather than separate the two. This work has taken me to China, Japan, and the Philippines, places I never expected to visit a scholar in Hispanic studies. I look forward to helping participants in the forum think critically and creatively about some things that seem completely innocuous, but are not, space, place, and the maps we build to make sense of them.

Navigating the Forum

In the first semester (Fall ’17) you will enroll in FORU 1500: Introduction to Space, Knowledge, and Power. Team-taught by Max Edelson and Ricardo Padrón, the introductory course will cover historical and theoretical readings chosen to help you think about your world in spatial terms. We hope that you will take this experience into your other courses, and use it to shape what you study, rather than to participate passively in a pre-determined agenda.

Outside of the introductory course and capstone, you will take courses across five categories:

Local Spaces

Regional, national, Cultural Spaces

Global Spaces

Space, Power, and Justice

Space, Science, and Math

The primary distinction between these categories is not discipline, but scale. We want you to think about different kings of spaces, so we have chosen to distribute our attention among local spaces (architecture, cities, global spaces (the world, through somne disciplinary lenses), and “in-between” scales. We have also identified an additional category, not around scale, but around issues of power and justice, which is central to any consideration of space in the humanities and social sciences today.

Finally, in your fourth semester (Spring, ’19), we will gather again to consider space as part of the Forum’s 3-credit Capstone.

AMST 3559 Indigenous Histories of Place
AMST 3559 Identity, Space, and Public Art
DRAM 1010 How Theatre Works
DRAM 2010 Theatre Art: Image to Form
HIEA 1559 Shanghai in Modern China
INST 1550 Housing and Urban Poverty
SOC 2950 The wire – Sociology through TV and Film
SOC 3470 Sociolgy of Development
SOC 3490 Cities and Cultures
ARTH 2372 Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century